On Tue, 23 July 2002, Michael Perelman wrote:
> I have never read Donne, but I saw the film Wit last night where his
> poetry figures large. He sounded very interesting.
I saw the play, and I thought the 5 minute excerpt from Strier's literary criticism of Donne's Holy Sonnets was the one piece of really great text in it.
Out of curiousity, how does the movie end? The play ended in a way that infuriated me. After she died in bed, the lights went out, and then came on for an instant, and we saw the actress (Kathleen Chalfant) standing naked center stage bathed in light, reaching upwards. And then she vanished. And you could see quite clearly that she was in outstanding shape for in a woman in her 50s, and had a stunning physical presence. And it made a mockery of the major argument of the play, namely that we could be comforted and accept the rotting of the body purely through the rigor of the mind. This last minute unveiling of a literally glorious body unveiled her character's whole argument as a sham. Of course the rotting of her body was easy to accept; the underlying reality was that she was healthy and glorious.
But what really cheesed me was that it was presented, in the play's emotionally strongest moment, as the underlying reality of death. That one flashed image, that solace for the audience, took back in one instant everything the play had said. The idea that there's an afterlife in which we'll all get glorious bodies is the purest kind of non-rigorous, non-intellectual, wish-fulfillment approach towards death imaginable. There's lots to be said for it when it comes to consoling people -- or audiences. But it's completely opposed to everything the play and this character and even the title says is their point. If the playwright (or the director -- I'm not sure who's at fault, which is part of my curiousity about whether the movie varies) was convinced that a mere audience, who wasn't really dying, but just watching the representation of someone else dying, couldn't live without this consolation, and would be much happier with it, and would feel it formed a better and deeper aesthetic whole with it, then what bullshit was the play's central contention that real people didn't need such such props when facing their own quite real death, that this style of cold analytic rigour could actually provide comfort if pushed far enough. When push came to shove, she obviously didn't believe a word of what she'd said. Fuzz out and imagine something pleasant, that's her real advice.
Mind you, I found Vivian Bearing's arguments about just about everything (except Donne) kind of chintzy. But this ending just sealed it. Some plays or movies are 10 times greater when they're unveiled at the end to be a lie. But for something so completely didactic I thought it was a disaster.
Okay now, I've got that off my chest, an unexpressed rant from 3 years ago. Now then -- was the ending of the movie entirely different? Was it was just the director's fault? Does anyone have a script where they could check if this glorious body bit is in the author's original stage directions?
Michael